A Look Around the Corner of PCism

Paul Cella notes a case in Australia that ought to act as a red flag in all areas currently or potentially afflicted with the multiculti PC cult of "tolerance." Rober Spencer reports:

One of the pastors, Daniel Scot, is Pakistani. He fled his native land seventeen years ago when he ran afoul of the notorious Section 295(c) of the Penal Code — which mandates death or life in prison for anyone who blasphemes "the sacred name of the holy Prophet Muhammad." It's a treacherously elastic statute that has been and is often used to snare Christians: cornered and made to state that they don't believe Muhammad was a prophet, they then find themselves charged with blasphemy.

Scot went to Australia, only to run afoul of that nation's new religious vilification laws. Last Friday, Judge Michael Higgins of The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal found him guilty of vilifying Islam in a seminar hosted by his group, Catch the Fire Ministries. The judge noted that during the seminar, Scot stated that "the Quran promotes violence, killing and looting." In light of Qur'anic passages such as 9:5, 2:191, 9:29, 47:4, 5:33 and many others, this cannot seriously be a matter of dispute. Muslims have pointed to verses in the Bible that they would have us believe are equivalent in violence and offensiveness, or have claimed that the great majority of Muslims don't take such verses literally; but it takes a peculiarly strong resistance to reality not only to deny that such verses are there, but to charge one who pointed them out with religious vilification.

In the comments to Cella's post, Australian reader Dave defends Higgins's decision on the grounds that "the two plantifs did not distingush between extreme Muslims and the Muslim religion in general, thus inspiting hatred against the Muslim community as a whole." That strikes me as a dangerously fine line to force people to walk in assessing other groups' religious doctrines. What, for instance, should the judgment be if the "extremists" of a religion have strong arguments that their method of practice (to be euphemistic) is rooted in foundational texts? Is Daniel Scot a criminal merely for lack of a disclaimer?

Attempting to answer a question that Cella posed to him concerning Christians' ability to judge variations of Muslim theology, Dave merely brings the problem into sharper focus:

In terms of judging, here's a simple rule of thumb: Extremists kill others and justify it in terms of religion. Moderates discuss religous ideas without killing people.

But where's the line? A mullah could "discuss" with his followers the glory that awaits those who sacrifice themselves in violent jihad. Would that be moderate? One could follow threads of culpability multiple degrees of separation from the actual coreligionists who "kill others and justify it in terms of religion."

At the very least, what "vilification" laws do is to prevent people outside of a religion from applying pressure to supposed moderates both to repudiate the extremists and to explain to them (and the world) why their interpretation of the shared texts and traditions is wrong.